Arts and Humanities Commons^™

‘Conspiring Together’: Woolf’S Investigations On ‘Party Consciousness’ And Interwar Instability In Mrs. Dalloway And To The Lighthouse, Madeline Smith

Theses and Dissertations

Woolf has been generalized popularly as enthusiastic about parties, relishing their effervescence and conversation, and she had a particular bent for imagining a party’s vivacity while often remaining distanced from it. This imagination and duality would mark Woolf’s thoughts as is recorded in her diary entries, and they became especially apparent in her fiction. In an entry on April 27^th, 1925, less than one month from Mrs. Dalloway’s May 14^th publication, she declares that “people have any number of states of consciousness” and reports that she “should like to investigate the party consciousness” (A Writer’s …

“Present Mirth Hath Present Laughter; What's To Come Is Still Unsure”: Death And Humor In Early Modern England, Elisha James Sircy

Theses and Dissertations

This study focuses on the workings of humor in 16th-and 17th-century England, particularly in its proximity and deployment around death. Through Early Modern theoretical discussions of humor as well as utterances, historical tracts, poetry, and drama of the time, humor’s role in interrupting or breaking up particular modes of interpretation can be seen. Surveying Castiglione and Puttenham, records of martyred Catholics and Protestants, the poetry of Spenser and Donne, and the dramatic works of Shakespeare, I argue that humor operates as a sort of short-circuiting of a given audience expectation that allows for a potential divergence from previous assertions or …

Going Hard, Going Easy, Going Home: Death And Dying In 20th Century African American Literature, Chayah Amayala Stoneberg-Cooper

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation answers the question: How can art represent the essential human experience of death, particularly when the creative context is one of extreme violence? And, what can be learned about the risks and rewards of the living's relationship with the dead by way of these artistic representations? Further, how do these aesthetic renderings of death construct the ethics of life for survivors? In the case of African America, discussion of, and responses to, these questions have been primarily explored in novelist and creative writing. This dissertation examines these novelistic treatments of death-tropes, or thanatropes in eight novels written by …

Rewriting The Human: Death Anxiety And Posthuman Vision In Literature Since 1945, John Allen Brooks

Theses and Dissertations

ISS_para>The technology-driven years following the close of World War II provided a new lens through which the human subject could be rethought and, theoretically, improved: no longer did physical and mental shortcomings have to limit the capacity of the individual. The atomic bomb and Colossus computer, though destructive forces, pushed scientists and philosophers to consider new models of the human, including flesh/machine amalgamation and reinscription as downloadable, digital information. While these posthuman constructions promised to distance the human from its material shortcomings, especially its vulnerability to bodily decay and death, they encountered significant resistance in the twentieth century.

By …